On Irony

Nietzsche warns that habituation to irony, like habituation to sarcasm, can spoil the character and turn one into a snapping dog 'which has learned how to laugh, but forgotten how to bite'.

No one wants that to happen. So we must therefore exercise caution and be alert to the dangers of cynicism. But I'm certainly not prepared to abandon irony, as many advocate, in the name of a new sincerity. For irony remains not only an important means of gaining critical distance from the object of analysis, but is also, as Barthes writes, 'the question which language puts to language' and that expands the latter by playing with its forms.

In other words, irony need not make one smug and superior and it need not be the narcissistic product of a thought which has collapsed inwardly and become fatally self-enclosed. At it's best, irony can make happy and set free. And it can help us recover something mistakenly believed to be its very antithesis: passion. For in becoming playful, we find once more the lost intensity of childhood.

Living Dolls

Thanks to the work of American Pygmalion Matt McMullen, sex-dolls have come a long way during the last two decades. In his obsessive desire to recreate as closely as possible the appearance and feel of  living female bodies, he has developed a range of silicone love companions complete with articulated skeletons, synthetic skin, real hair, and three fully penetrable 'pleasure portals'. 

But, ironically, just as McMullen's RealDolls become ever-more life-like, so real women are becoming ever-more doll-like, due to advances in cosmetic surgery and pressure exerted by our culture for conformity to a deep-throated and large-breasted, but small-waisted and pubicly-hairless ideal formulated within the pornographic imagination.  

And so we come to the case of Valeria Lukyanova; the 21 year old Ukrainian model and internet sensation. Miss Lukyanova - or the Russian Barbie doll as the press like to describe her - is, for us in 2013, what La Cicciolina was for Baudrillard in 1993: a marvellous incarnation of sex in pornographic innocence. 

With her customized body and "realer-than-real curves worthy of an inflatable doll", Miss Lukyanova is both transsexual and transhuman and, as Lawrence would say, she exists beyond desire, cut off from any mystery or allure: even her nudity is no more enticing than that of a dolls. 

All of this casts an interesting light upon the sexual revolution espoused with such passion and conviction by an earlier generation. We were promised that "the bursting forth of the body's full erotic force" would be particularly favourable to women and yet they've ended up having silicone implanted into their breasts and submitting to Hollywood waxing, labiaplasty, and anal bleaching.     

  

Anti-Oedipus

Blood is thicker than water, so they say. Which is true enough, but why should viscosity and a certain heavy stickiness be privileged over fluidity and sparkle? Why should family bonds be thought of as so much more vital and important than friendships formed?

There is always something suspect about those who fetishize the blood and pride themselves on their genetic inheritance. I would never put siblings before strangers simply on the grounds that I share parental DNA with the former and it seems to me that non-familial connections are the source of real joy in this life.

And so when she said her sister was dearer to her than anyone else, I had to conclude that she was all too human in her incestual primitivism and probably a fascist at heart.  

Feathered Friends

Luce Irigaray writes some very lovely lines concerning the precious and mysterious assistance she has received in her life and work directly from birds:

"Birds are our friends. But also our guides, our scouts. Our angels in some respect. They accompany persons who are alone, comfort them, restoring their health and their courage. Birds do more. Birds lead one's becoming. The birds' song heals many a useless word ... restores silence, delivers silence. The bird consoles, gives back to life, but not to inertia."

                                                               

      - 'Animal Compassion', trans. Marilyn Gaddis Rose, in Animal Philosophy, (Continuum, 2004), p. 197.

All of this is true. Which is why feeding the pair of pigeons who have set up home on my balcony - and even cleaning up the mess they make - is never a chore, but always a source of happiness. I like the fact that they live their lives on one side of the glass and I live mine on the other and that we have, over the years, become familiar and established a bond of trust and affection. 

People who don't like birds, or who are unkind to them - who call pigeons vermin and argue for their removal from our public spaces - have something wrong with them I think. To close your ears to birdsong is ultimately to close your heart to love.

Me and Zena x Saatchi Gallery Paint Can Ring

Zena McKeown's Paint Can Ring, which features as part of her Saatchi Gallery Collection, is a tiny piece of perfection: smart, witty, and lovely to look at, it puts to shame many of the expensive artworks displayed in the gallery itself and reinforces my belief that today what really excites our imagination can invariably be found in the gift shop, rather than the main building; that the latter merely serves as an alibi for the former.

In other words, we traipse round art galleries and museums bored out of our skulls, merely because it affords us the opportunity and the pleasure of shopping. Who needs aesthetic transcendence or edification when you can purchase postcards, t-shirts, and novel designer items that brilliantly capture and express who and what we are as a people?    

Coincidentally, the ring - in my mind at least - also nicely anticipates the Yves Saint Laurent campaign for Manifesto, featuring Jessica Chastain, that I love so much. Miss McKeown is thus to be commended for not simply being on trend, but ahead of the game with this design.  

Epilation

The policing and removal of female body hair is practised in every phallocratic society for a number of reasons - from religious phobia to cultural fashion - using a wide variety of methods. 

In the Western world, women have been obliged to shave legs and underarms for over a century. But it is only recently that they have also been expected as a matter of porno-social convention to remove hair from the pubic region like an Arab woman; not as an act of Fitrah, or in the name of hygiene, but due to changing ideas of what constitutes desirability.

I have to confess, I remain a little troubled by this trend. 

For whilst I understand the appeal of the hairless pussy on grounds that range from the aesthetic to the practical and perverse, still I can't help regretting the universal Brazilianization of women as I recall the words of Henry Miller: 'It doesn't look like a cunt anymore; it's like a dead clam or something. It's the hair that makes it mysterious.'  

Eat the Rich!

Westminster Council are considering cutting benefits paid to obese claimants who refuse to lose weight and enrol on authorised fitness programmes. Evidence, one might suggest, that if Tory politicians and their rich paymasters hate the poor and the unemployed, they positively despise the poor and the unemployed who also have the audacity to overeat. 

For as Baudrillard pointed out thirty years ago, when obesity was almost an exclusively American phenomenon, the super-sized display the truth of the very system that produced them; its greed, its empty inflation, and its lack of shame. 

The obese accept the challenge thrown down by contemporary capitalism: 'You want us to consume? Ok, we'll consume everything until we are no longer fit to work and we swallow you and all your money.' 

When there's no hope of revolution or active resistance, then there can only be a passive-aggressive (and potentially suicidal) response to the violence and obscenity of the culture we are all a part of. Obesity, in other words, is a fatal strategy: an ironic transpolitical counter-challenge to the morbidity of the fat cats. 

Unnatural Alliances

I have always been a big fan of unnatural alliances, formed, for example, between Beauty and the Beast, Pygmalion and Galatea, or the Owl and the Pussycat, who went to sea in beautiful pea-green boat. 

For the great and intoxicating truth is that once desire has been deterritorialized from its traditional object and aim, then it is free to reterritorialize on all kinds of strange attractors, in all manner of perverse new ways. 

In other words: we can form erotic relations with anything and everything and love achieves its consummation not when boy meets girl, or even boy meets boy, but when entirely heterogenous terms and territories are brought together. 

Thus the advocates of gay marriage are, I'm afraid, nowhere near radical enough in their thinking. What they should be demanding is an end to all anthropomorphic representations of sex: for freedom begins not when everyone has the right to be married in a church, but to be married to a church if they so wish.

Tell that to Pope Benedict XVI.

Senescence

People - especially women over 35 who hold degrees in psychology - like to talk about spiritual growth and personal development, but are much less keen to talk about biological ageing.

Partly, this is because the violent changes to molecular and cellular structure over time invariably result in deterioration and death and no matter how priests, poets, and philosophers might like to dress it up, there's nothing fun about growing old and no one dies with dignity. In fact, death is the ultimate loss of dignity: a shipwreck into the nauseous, as Bataille so charmingly puts it.

The precise etiology of senescence is still largely undetermined and the process seems to be complex. Nevertheless, you can see it every time you look in the mirror, or, as here, by simply placing a series of photographs side by side showing the full ravages of time and decade after decade of fading youth and the failure of homeodynamics.  

Dandelions

The body is always looking to exert itself and escape the overcoding of the organism. And it does this in a number of ways that range from the spasm of orgasm, to the sudden yawn or burst of laughter. D. H. Lawrence understood this as a painter, which is why so many of his figures seem to have given themselves over to 'unselfconscious physicality and abandon', as Keith Sagar puts it.

Thus, when in a watercolour entitled Dandelions Lawrence depicts a man urinating on some flowers, he is not simply trying to shock those for whom biological functions are embarrassing or degrading, but also attempting to show how such a simple act might be conceived as expressive of the intensive forces of bodily sensation.

And so perhaps there was something not only touching about the drunk young woman pissing outside the tube station last night, but also liberating.